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Current Status
Fusion is a free, closed-source emulator of 680x0 based Macintosh machines. It's a DOS application and recommended for use on older
DOS-based or Win 95/98 computers. The current version is 3.0, available from Emulators, Inc. Users can run OS 7.0.1 to 8.1 within the emulated Macintosh.
The program is not under active development. Version 3.0 was released in 2000.
History
Fusion was originally developed by Microcode Solutions, an old player in the commercial Macintosh emulation market. Before founding Microcode, company President
and CEO Jim Drew spent time with a business called Utilities Unlimited International which created EMPLANT,
a means of emulating the Macintosh computer on Amiga machines via hardware purchased from the company. Drew described the EMPLANT hardware
as "basically a Mac II motherboard on an Amiga plug-in card."
When (as Drew alleges) EMPLANT code was illegally utilized by Christian Bauer (who would later create Basilisk II) to create Shapeshifter,
a shareware Mac-on-Amiga emulator, UUI was put out of business. Drew, however, continued his emulation work by founding "Microcode Solutions"
on August 24 1996. Microcode developed "Fusion,"
a software-only (no costly hardware required) Macintosh emulator for the Amiga system. Fusion was ported to x86 (PC) architecture and released as
"Fusion-PC" in July of 1998. A demo version of the emulator was released soon afterwards, and the official Microcode site logged over two million downloads
of it in less than three years. Though quite popular, initial releases of Fusion-PC ran solely in DOS, causing difficulty for many users.
Later releases corrected this problem by giving Fusion the ability to run in a DOS window.
On May 23 2000, Jim Drew sold Fusion-PC to Darek Mihocka's "Emulators, Inc.," a rival company with a similarly long history in Macintosh emulation on various
platforms. Drew stated that he could no longer afford to support an antiquated program while attempting to create an emulator of PPC Macintosh computers.
In April of 2001, Microcode Solutions released "iFusion," a software-only emulator of the PPC Macintosh for the Amiga computer. The company stated at that
time that a port of iFusion to the Windows operating system was almost complete. Drew indicated then that the initial port of
iFusion would require hardware support, but that a software-only
version would be released at a later date. Drew later sold iFusion for Amiga to a retailer called "Virtual Programming Limited" without releasing a Windows port.
Microcode-Solutions has been inactive since about 2002.
Required Reading
Links
Official Download Page
Microcode Solutions (nothing here, really)
Files
System Specs
Emulates: up tp 68040
ROM Required: Yes - 512 KB or 1 MB
Memory: Unlimited
Sound: Supported
Mac OS supported: 7.0.1 to 8.1
Hard Drive size: Unlimited
Current Version: 3.0
Creator: Jim Drew
Price: Free
Runs On: DOS
Screenshots
page updated 25 August, 2008 |
